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      For Republicans, ‘Crisis’ Is the Message as the Outrage Machine Ramps Up

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      With next year’s midterm elections seen as a referendum on Democratic rule, Republicans are seeking to create a sense of instability and overreach, diverting focus from their own divisions.WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders would like everyone to know that the nation is in crisis.There is an economic crisis, they say, with rising prices and overly generous unemployment benefits; a national security crisis; a border security crisis, with its attendant homeland security crisis, humanitarian crisis, and public health crisis; and a separate energy crisis.Pressed Tuesday on whether the nation is really so beleaguered, the No. 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, thought of still more crises: anti-Semitism in the Democratic ranks, “yet another crisis,” he asserted, and a labor shortage crisis.“Unfortunately they’re all real,” he said capping a 25-minute news conference in which the word “crisis” was used once a minute, “and they’re all being caused by President Biden’s actions.”As Americans groggily emerge from their pandemic-driven isolation, they could be forgiven for not seeing the situation as quite so dire. They might also be a little confused about which of the many outrages truly needs their focus: the border, perhaps, but what about Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and the Wuhan lab leak theory, the teaching of critical race theory in the nation’s schools, the fact that some schools are not fully reopened, Representative Ilhan Omar, or all those transgender athletes competing in high school sports?But for divided House Republicans, outrage may be the tie that binds — at least their leaders hope so.“Look, our main crisis is we’re not the majority — that’s our top crisis,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma.House Republicans, still overwhelmingly in the thrall of Donald J. Trump, have learned over the last four years that grievance, loudly expressed, carries political weight, especially with their core voters. Mr. Trump certainly did not teach members of his party how to express anger over perceived injustices; many of them had been doing it for years. But the House Republican leadership has shifted to Trumpian expressions of outrage since the days of former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, a self-described “policy guy” with a happy-warrior image, and the backslapping bonhomie of his predecessor John A. Boehner.There is a method to all the remonstrance. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who took over as the message maestro of the Republican conference after the banishment of Representative Liz Cheney, hatched the crisis strategy as one of her first ventures, Mr. Cole said, distributing talking points this month on the perils facing the country.He thought the list had five crises; Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington, remembered four.The idea is that with Democrats in control of the White House, House and Senate, next year’s midterm elections will be a referendum on one-party control, not on Republican governing plans, said Mr. Cole, a former chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign arm. The Republicans, at least this early in the political cycle, need to seed a sense of instability, overreach and fear, he said.The strategy is also predicated on the adage that the best defense is a good offense. By focusing on an array of real or imagined disasters, Republicans avoid addressing the crisis in democracy created by Mr. Trump with his efforts to nullify the election, which he continues to stoke. On Tuesday night, 21 House Republicans voted against awarding congressional gold medals to the Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers who protected them when a mob of the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.David Winston, who has long worked with congressional Republicans on polling and messaging, said every new president faces an early challenge, and how he responds helps cement his image with curious voters. Republicans tried to make that early challenge the surge of migrants — including unaccompanied children — at the border.But there is a risk of throwing up too much chaff, he said. And eventually, Republican leaders are going to have to find a theme, like former Speaker John Boehner’s groan-worthy “Where are the jobs?” mantra. Its repetition might have annoyed reporters, but it was effective with voters.A group of migrants who recently crossed the border from Mexico into Yuma, Ariz., waiting to be taken to a processing center. Republican leaders have focused on a “crisis” at the border as well as several other issues.Ariana Drehsler for The New York TimesRepublicans have long been better than Democrats at imparting a sense of crisis. They made Solyndra a household name, with heated news conferences, accusatory hearings and angry statements, when the solar company went bankrupt and left the Obama administration — and the taxpayers — the bill for a $535 million federal loan guarantee that was part of Barack Obama’s economic rescue plan. This week, an electric pickup truck plant in Lordstown, Ohio, midwifed by Mr. Trump, lost its top executives, its prototype burst into flames and it is on the brink of collapse — with hardly a Democratic peep.The deadly terrorist assault on Benghazi became a two-year ordeal for Hillary Clinton, thanks to the Republican outrage machine, while a botched military raid ordered by Mr. Trump in Niger, which left four Americans dead, has largely been forgotten — even after Mr. Trump fumbled the name of one of the dead and told a grieving widow her husband “knew what he signed up for.”Brad Woodhouse, a veteran Democratic operative, said some in the party had wanted to “Benghazi” the Niger raid, but, “It’s just not who most of the Dem Party and Dem Party leadership is.”“I guess you can say we don’t gin up phony crises, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” he added. “At some point, the public turns back to what they think is reasonable leadership.”Democrats have not been able to get the same traction even on the Capitol riot, which aimed to stop the official awarding of a presidential election to its victor, in part because Republican antics and accusations have disrupted hearings on the assault.Part of the Republican advantage is just a sheer will to muscle through, regardless of Democratic incredulity. One of this week’s outrages is Mr. Biden’s supposed weakness before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a “crisis” that seeks to send four years of Mr. Trump’s deference to the Russian leader down the memory hole.Veteran House Republicans say they have a traditional message to impart.“I think the biggest contrast right now with the Biden-Pelosi agenda is their goal to control from Washington so much of your daily life, from your paycheck to your health care decisions to everything else,” said Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas. “We stand for the opposite. We want to create more freedom for individuals with lower taxes, a stronger economy and a safer nation.”But that message has been lost amid a constantly shifting menu of crises and outrages. At the state level, Republican legislators have obscured very real efforts to curtail voting access by spotlighting cultural issues like blocking transgender athletes from high school competitions or stopping the teaching to children of “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that explores how racism is infused in American institutions.But a drumbeat of cries for Vice President Kamala Harris to visit a southwestern border in crisis gave way to accusations that the nation’s gasoline supply was nearing collapse, which then subsided amid demands for the firing of the government’s leading virologist, Dr. Fauci, and an investigation of the theory that the coronavirus was engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, then released on the world.Last week, the target of Republican outrage was Ms. Omar, after a tweet she posted that appeared to equate the actions of Israel and the United States with the human rights abuses of Hamas and the Taliban. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, called the tweet anti-Semitic — though it did not mention Jews or Judaism — and threatened to try to remove Ms. Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, an action they have yet to take.Republicans are also pressing their case that the push by some progressive Democrats to “defund the police” has led directly to a very real surge in crime facing the nation’s cities.It can get difficult to keep up with all the catastrophizing. On Tuesday, minutes after Representative Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, warned of Moscow’s aggressive cyber attacks and a looming Russian stranglehold over Europe’s power supply, Mr. Scalise said, “I don’t know if Vice President Harris understands the crisis is not in Europe, it’s at America’s southern border, and she and President Biden created it.”There are plans to put together some Republican policy proposals. Mr. McCarthy has assembled seven task forces: jobs and the economy; Big Tech censorship; the “Future of American Freedoms”; energy, climate and conservation; American security; “healthy future”; and China. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who leads the big tech task force, said the panels will take a year to come up with legislative and policy responses to take into the midterm elections.“The goal is to be ready on Day 1,” should the Republicans take back the majority, she said.For now, even Republicans who have been critical of their leaders say they have time to formulate an agenda beyond the outrage machine they are eagerly feeding. Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, noted that Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America really didn’t emerge until September 1994, two months before Republicans’ resounding midterm sweep.“There’s night-and-day difference between Republicans and Democrats, say, on border security, where we’re fairly united that we need to secure the border, and I don’t think they care,” he said. “We’re watching small businesses unable to hire people because they’re paying people more not to work. We’re pretty united on those key differences. Thematically bringing all that together and how you message that the American people, I think that’s something you work on.”As for the Democrats, most simply don’t think the crisis talk is working, beyond spinning out clicks for right-wing media outlets and Facebook algorithms that thrive on outrage over such things as the decision by Dr. Seuss’s estate to cease publishing works that include egregious racial and ethnic stereotypes or the switch by Hasbro to a non-gendered brand name for its iconic plastic toy, now known as Potato Head.“President Biden, for all this angst, including Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, has a plus-eight approval rating overall, a plus-four on the economy and a plus-28 approval on the pandemic,” Mr. Woodhouse said.As House Republican leaders were leaving the stage on Tuesday, Ms. Stefanik wanted to reiterate for one last time the state of a nation on the brink.“Thank you so much for embracing our effective messaging,” she told a small clutch of reporters, sitting in socially distanced seating. “America is in crisis.” More

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      Democratic Report Raises 2022 Alarms on Messaging and Voter Outreach

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      A new report, in perhaps the most thorough soul-searching done by either party this year, points to an urgent need for the party to present a positive economic agenda and rebut Republican misinformation.Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.The 70-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the ultra-precarious margins they enjoy.Read the reportThree prominent Democratic groups, Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, conducted a review of the 2020 election.Read Document 73 pagesIn part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s support with voters of color who loathed Mr. Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down,” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.“Win or lose, self-described progressive or moderate, Democrats consistently raised a lack of strong Democratic Party brand as a significant concern in 2020,” the report states. “In the absence of strong party branding, the opposition latched on to G.O.P. talking points, suggesting our candidates would ‘burn down your house and take away the police.’”Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who lost re-election in South Florida in November, said in an interview that she had spoken with the authors of the report and raised concerns about Democratic outreach to Hispanic voters and the party’s failure to rebut misinformation in Spanish-language media.“Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has in some ways lost touch with our electorate,” Ms. Mucarsel-Powell said. “There is this assumption that of course people of color, or the working class, are going to vote for Democrats. We can never assume anything.”The report, chiefly written by a pair of veteran Democratic operatives, Marlon Marshall and Lynda Tran, is among the most significant salvos yet in the Democratic Party’s internal debate about how it should approach the 2022 elections. It may stir skepticism from some quarters because of the involvement of Third Way, which much of the left regards with hostility.A fourth group that initially backed the study, the campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, backed away this spring. Tiffany Muller, the head of the group, said it had to abandon its involvement to focus instead on passing the For the People Act, a sweeping good-government bill that is stuck in the Senate.Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat, lost re-election in South Florida last year. She remains worried about her party’s outreach to Hispanic voters.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesMr. Marshall and Ms. Tran, as well as the groups sponsoring the review, have begun to share its conclusions with Democratic lawmakers and party officials in recent days, including Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.The study spanned nearly six months of research and data analysis that scrutinized about three dozen races for the House and the Senate, and involved interviews with 143 people, including lawmakers, candidates and pollsters, people involved in assembling the report said. Among the campaigns reviewed were the Senate elections in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as House races in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas, and in rural New Mexico and Maine.The study follows an internal review conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that was unveiled last month. Both projects found that Democratic candidates had been hobbled by flawed polling and pandemic-imposed limitations on campaigning.In the D.C.C.C. report, the committee attributed setbacks at the congressional level to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to attacks calling them police-hating socialists.Some lawmakers on the left have complained that criticism of left-wing messaging amounts to scapegoating activists for the party’s failures.Yet the review by Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund goes further in diagnosing the party’s messaging as deficient in ways that may have cost Democrats more than a dozen seats in the House. Its report offers a blunt assessment that in 2020, Republicans succeeded in misleading voters about the Democratic Party’s agenda and that Democrats had erred by speaking to voters of color as though they are a monolithic, left-leaning group.Representative Tony Cárdenas of California, who helms the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political action committee, embraced that critique of Democratic messaging and said the party should discard the assumption “that voters of color are inherently more progressive.”“That’s been a ridiculous idea and that’s never been true,” Mr. Cárdenas said, lamenting that Republicans had succeeded in “trying to confuse Latino voters with the socialism message, things of that nature, ‘defund the police.’”Quentin James, the president of the Collective PAC, said it was clear that “some of the rhetoric we see from coastal Democrats” had been problematic. Mr. James pointed to the activist demand to “defund” the police as especially harmful, even with supporters of policing overhauls.“We did a poll that showed Black voters, by and large, vastly support reforming the police and reallocating their budgets,” Mr. James said. “That terminology — ‘defund’ — was not popular in the Black community.”A report by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attributed the party’s setbacks to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to Republican attacks.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesKara Eastman, a progressive Democrat who lost her bid for a House seat based in Omaha, said Republicans had succeeded in delivering a “barrage of messages” that tarred her and her party as being outside the mainstream. Ms. Eastman said she had told the authors of the 2020 review that she believed those labels were particularly damaging to women.Matt Bennett, a Third Way strategist, said the party needed to be far better prepared to mount a defense in the midterm campaign.“We have got to take very seriously these attacks on Democrats as radicals and stipulate that they land,” Mr. Bennett said. “A lot of this just didn’t land on Joe Biden.”Democrats maintained a large advantage with voters of color in the 2020 elections, but the report identified telling areas of weakness. Mr. Biden and other Democrats lost ground with Latino voters relative to the party’s performance in 2016, “especially among working-class and non-college voters in these communities,” the report found.The report found that a surge in Asian American turnout appeared to have secured Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia but that Democratic House candidates ran behind Mr. Biden with Asian American voters in contested California and Texas races. In some important states, Democrats did not mobilize Black voters at the same rate that Republicans did conservative white voters.“A substantial boost in turnout netted Democrats more raw votes from Black voters than in 2016, but the explosive growth among white voters in most races outpaced these gains,” the report warns.There has been no comparable self-review on the Republican side after the party’s severe setbacks last year, mainly because G.O.P. leaders have no appetite for a debate about Mr. Trump’s impact.Republicans will continue to have structural advantages in Washington because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College. Erin Scott for The New York TimesThe Republican Party faces serious political obstacles, arising from Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, the growing liberalism of young voters and the country’s growing diversity. Many of the party’s policies are unpopular, including cutting social-welfare and retirement-security programs and keeping taxes low for the wealthy and big corporations.Yet the structure of the American electoral system has tilted national campaigns toward the G.O.P., because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College.Democratic hopes for the midterm elections have so far hinged on the prospect of a strong recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and on voters’ regarding Republicans as a party unsuited to governing.Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat who was briefed on the findings of the report, called it proof that the party needed a strong central message about the economy in 2022.“We need to continue to show the American people what we’ve done, and then talk incessantly across the country, in every town, about how Democrats are governing,” Ms. Sherrill said.Largely unaddressed in the report is the immense deficit Democrats face among lower-income white voters. In its conclusion, however, Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran write that Democrats need to deliver a message that includes working-class whites and matches the G.O.P.’s clear “collective gospel” about low taxes and military strength.“Our gospel should be about championing all working people — including but not limited to white working people — and lifting up our values of opportunity, equity, inclusion,” they write. More

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      VP Kamala Harris Asked to Lead on Voting Rights, and It's a Challenge

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      Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the most extensive elections overhaul in a generation.WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris did not come to her role with a list of demands. She wanted to be a generalist, in large part to learn the political rhythms of a president she was still getting to know. In the first few months of her tenure, some of her portfolio assignments were just that: assignments.But on the matter of protecting voting rights, an issue critically important to President Biden’s legacy, Ms. Harris took a rare step. In a meeting with the president over a month ago, she told him that she wanted to take the lead on the issue.Mr. Biden agreed, two people familiar with the discussions said, and his advisers decided to time the announcement of Ms. Harris’s new role to a speech he delivered on Tuesday in Tulsa, Okla. In his remarks, the president declared the efforts of Republican-led statehouses around the country to make it harder to vote as an “assault on our democracy, ” and said Ms. Harris could help lead the charge against them.He also gave a blunt assessment of the task: “It’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.”Back in Washington, the president’s announcement has not clearly illuminated a path forward for Ms. Harris, whose involvement in the issue stands to become her most politically delicate engagement yet. Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the farthest-reaching elections overhaul in a generation, including a landmark expansion of voting rights that is faltering in the Senate.Her office has not yet announced its plans, aside from calls Ms. Harris held with civil rights activists, including Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a few scheduled meetings with prominent voting rights groups. Her advisers say she will take a wide-ranging approach to the issue by giving speeches, convening stakeholders and using the vice-presidential bully pulpit to raise awareness of the importance of the vote.“The work of voting rights has implications for not just one year down the road or four years down the road but 50 years from now,” Symone D. Sanders, the vice president’s senior adviser and press secretary, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The president understands that and the vice president understands that, and that’s why we will implement a comprehensive strategy.”The voting rights bill faces a more urgent timeline. The vast majority of the party has agreed to make the bill the party’s top legislative priority, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, vowed to put it up for a vote later this month so any changes could be put into effect before the 2022 elections.With just weeks to go, it remains far from clear if it can actually pass. Because Republicans have locked arms in opposition, the only path forward would require all 50 Democrats — plus Ms. Harris, who serves as the tiebreaking vote in an evenly divided Senate — to support not only the substance of the bill, but changing the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to approve major legislation, allowing it to pass with a simple majority instead.A handful of Democratic senators have expressed unease about changing the filibuster, while Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have been more adamant in their opposition.Mr. Biden has already pledged to sign the bill, which the House passed with only Democratic votes this spring. Known as the For the People Act, the bill would overhaul the nation’s elections system by creating new national requirements for early and mail-in voting, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But with the bill all but stalled in the Senate, Mr. Biden has repeatedly expressed concern over its future in his discussions with Democrats.The announcement that Ms. Harris would be working to move the bill forward took many on Capitol Hill by surprise. Ms. Harris and Mr. Schumer spoke on Tuesday — and had plans to hold a follow-up conversation late Wednesday, a White House official said — but it did not appear Mr. Manchin or Ms. Sinema were given a heads up.In a statement, Mr. Schumer said he welcomed Ms. Harris’s help navigating into law an elections overhaul that was “essential to protecting the future of our democracy.”Proponents of the voting legislation took her involvement as a sign that their attempts to build pressure not just on lawmakers, but the White House, were being felt.Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said he welcomed Ms. Harris’s help navigating into law an elections overhaul that was “essential to protecting the future of our democracy.”Erin Scott for The New York Times“It’s an interesting move given the long odds of anything getting passed and signed into law,” said James P. Manley, who served as a senior aide to former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader before Mr. Schumer. “There’s not a lot of cards to play right now, so it shows me they are going to try to raise the public temperature of this thing.”Others pointed out that even though Mr. Biden has decades of experience moving legislation through the Senate, Ms. Harris, the first woman and woman of color to hold her role, comes to the issue with an equally valuable perspective as the country grapples with the ways American policies have marginalized and mistreated Black people.“I think that Vice President Harris herself personifies the need for voting rights to be extended,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, who attended the speech in Tulsa, said in an interview. “When she’s on the phone or walks into an office, we’re looking at the reason we need voting rights.”Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said that the decision to elevate Ms. Harris as the face of the administration’s work on the issue was a pivotal moment for the Biden White House given the number of voter suppression efforts that were moving forward — 389 bills in 48 states and counting, according to a tracker maintained the Brennan Center.“It has been decades since a Democratic White House has made voting rights and democracy reform a central goal,” Mr. Waldman said, but he added, “the clock is ticking.”Ms. Harris’s impact on the hand-to-hand politics of the Senate is expected to be limited, but she often drew attention to voting rights during her four years as a senator. During her last year in the Senate, Ms. Harris introduced legislation that would expand election security measures, require each state to have early in-person voting periods and allow for an expansion of mail-in absentee ballots.In 2020, Ms. Harris was also a co-sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore a piece of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that relied on a formula to identify states with a history of discrimination and require that those jurisdictions clear any changes to their voting processes with the federal government. The protections were eliminated by the Supreme Court in 2013.Still, Ms. Harris, who spent a chunk of her time in the Senate running for president, was not known for building especially close relationships with colleagues, and Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema are no exceptions.Several Democratic aides who work closely with the senators scoffed on Wednesday at the idea that Ms. Harris, known as a staunch liberal, would be the one to persuade either moderate lawmaker to change the filibuster rule. Nor is Ms. Harris a likely candidate to broker the kind of compromise on the substance of the bill needed to persuade Mr. Manchin, the only Democrat who has not sponsored it, to back it.Ms. Harris’s attempts in February to nudge Mr. Manchin to back the White House’s proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package are illustrative.Mr. Manchin was piqued when Ms. Harris appeared, without warning, on a television affiliate in West Virginia to promote the package before he backed it. Though a Democratic aide familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly, said the episode was now “water under the bridge,” it prompted cleanup by top White House officials.Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema’s offices declined to comment about Ms. Harris’s new role.Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are doing their best to kill the bill and blunt any Democratic attempt to change the filibuster rule, which would leave their party powerless to stop the passage of sweeping liberal priorities well beyond voting rights.At an event in his home state on Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, argued that Democrats were inflating the impact of new state voting laws in an attempt to justify an unwarranted and chaotic slew of top-down changes to the way states run elections.“What is going on is the Democrats are trying to convince the Senate that states are involved in trying to prevent people from voting in order to pass a total federal takeover in how we conduct elections,” he told reporters. He said “not a single member” of his party supported the bill.Aware of the daunting path ahead, allies of the White House said that shepherding the bill through Congress was only one piece of the effort. Ms. Harris could be useful in helping ratchet up pressure on private companies, working with civil rights organizations, and engaging local communities over the importance of registering to vote.“She understands the need to engage in what I’d like to call kind of an ‘all of the above approach,’” said Representative Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. “We can’t take anything for granted when we’re talking about having people’s voice heard at the ballot box.” More

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      Harris Asked to Lead on Voting Rights, and It's a Challenge

      by

      Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the most extensive elections overhaul in a generation.WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris did not come to her role with a list of demands. She wanted to be a generalist, in large part to learn the political rhythms of a president she was still getting to know. In the first few months of her tenure, some of her portfolio assignments were just that: assignments.But on the matter of protecting voting rights, an issue critically important to President Biden’s legacy, Mr. Harris took a rare step. In a meeting with the president over a month ago, she told him that she wanted to take the lead on the issue.Mr. Biden agreed, two people familiar with the discussions said, and his advisers decided to time the announcement of Ms. Harris’s new role to a speech he delivered on Tuesday in Tulsa, Okla. In his remarks, the president declared the efforts of Republican-led statehouses around the country to make it harder to vote as an “assault on our democracy, ” and said Ms. Harris could help lead the charge against them.He also gave a blunt assessment of the task: “It’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.”Back in Washington, the president’s announcement has not clearly illuminated a path forward for Ms. Harris, whose involvement in the issue stands to become her most politically delicate engagement yet. Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the farthest-reaching elections overhaul in a generation, including a landmark expansion of voting rights that is faltering in the Senate.Her office has not yet announced its plans, aside from calls Ms. Harris held with civil rights activists, including Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a few scheduled meetings with prominent voting rights groups. Her advisers say she will take a wide-ranging approach to the issue by giving speeches, convening stakeholders and using the vice-presidential bully pulpit to raise awareness of the importance of the vote.“The work of voting rights has implications for not just one year down the road or four years down the road but 50 years from now,” Symone Sanders, the vice president’s senior adviser and press secretary, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The president understands that and the vice president understands that, and that’s why we will implement a comprehensive strategy.”The voting rights bill faces a more urgent timeline. The vast majority of the party has agreed to make the bill the party’s top legislative priority, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, vowed to put it up for a vote later this month so any changes could be put into effect before the 2022 elections.With just weeks to go, it remains far from clear if it can actually pass. Because Republicans have locked arms in opposition, the only path forward would require all 50 Democrats — plus Ms. Harris, who serves as the tiebreaking vote in an evenly divided Senate — to support not only the substance of the bill, but changing the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to approve major legislation, allowing it to pass with a simple majority instead.A handful of Democratic senators have expressed unease about changing the filibuster, while Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, have been more adamant in their opposition.Mr. Biden has already pledged to sign the bill, which the House passed with only Democratic votes this spring. Known as the For the People Act, the bill would overhaul the nation’s elections system by creating new national requirements for early and mail-in voting, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But with the bill all but stalled in the Senate, Mr. Biden has repeatedly expressed concern over its future in his discussions with Democrats.The announcement that Ms. Harris would be working to move the bill forward took many on Capitol Hill by surprise. Ms. Harris and Mr. Schumer spoke on Tuesday — and had plans to hold a follow-up conversation late Wednesday, a White House official said — but it did not appear Mr. Manchin or Ms. Sinema were given a heads up.In a statement, Mr. Schumer said he welcomed Ms. Harris’s help navigating into law an elections overhaul that was “essential to protecting the future of our democracy.”Proponents of the voting legislation took her involvement as a sign that their attempts to build pressure not just on lawmakers, but the White House, were being felt.Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said he welcomed Ms. Harris’s help navigating into law an elections overhaul that was “essential to protecting the future of our democracy.”Erin Scott for The New York Times“It’s an interesting move given the long odds of anything getting passed and signed into law,” said James P. Manley, who served as a senior aide to former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader before Mr. Schumer. “There’s not a lot of cards to play right now, so it shows me they are going to try to raise the public temperature of this thing.”Others pointed out that even though Mr. Biden has decades of experience moving legislation through the Senate, Ms. Harris, the first woman and woman of color to hold her role, comes to the issue with an equally valuable perspective as the country grapples with the ways American policies have marginalized and mistreated Black people.“I think that Vice President Harris herself personifies the need for voting rights to be extended,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, who attended the speech in Tulsa, said in an interview. “When she’s on the phone or walks into an office, we’re looking at the reason we need voting rights.”Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said that the decision to elevate Ms. Harris as the face of the administration’s work on the issue was a pivotal moment for the Biden White House given the number of voter suppression efforts that were moving forward — 389 bills in 48 states and counting, according to a tracker maintained the Brennan Center.“It has been decades since a Democratic White House has made voting rights and democracy reform a central goal,” Mr. Waldman said, but he added, “the clock is ticking.”Ms. Harris’s impact on the hand-to-hand politics of the Senate is expected to be limited, but she often drew attention to voting rights during her four years as a senator. During her last year in the Senate, Ms. Harris introduced legislation that would expand election security measures, require each state to have early in-person voting periods and allow for an expansion of mail-in absentee ballots.In 2020, Ms. Harris was also a co-sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore a piece of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that relied on a formula to identify states with a history of discrimination and require that those jurisdictions clear any changes to their voting processes with the federal government. The protections were eliminated by the Supreme Court in 2013.Still, Ms. Harris, who spent a chunk of her time in the Senate running for president, was not known for building especially close relationships with colleagues, and Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema are no exceptions.Several Democratic aides who work closely with the senators scoffed on Wednesday at the idea that Ms. Harris, known as a staunch liberal, would be the one to persuade either moderate lawmaker to change the filibuster rule. Nor is Ms. Harris a likely candidate to broker the kind of compromise on the substance of the bill needed to persuade Mr. Manchin, the only Democrat who has not sponsored it, to back it.Ms. Harris’s attempts in February to nudge Mr. Manchin to back the White House’s proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package is illustrative.Mr. Manchin was piqued when Ms. Harris appeared, without warning, on a television affiliate in West Virginia to promote the package before he backed it. Though a Democratic aide familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly, said the episode was now “water under the bridge” it prompted cleanup by top White House officials.Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema’s offices declined to comment about Ms. Harris’s new role.Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are doing their best to kill the bill and blunt any Democratic attempt to change the filibuster rule, which would leave their party powerless to stop the passage of sweeping liberal priorities well beyond voting rights.At an event in his home state on Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, argued that Democrats were inflating the impact of new state voting laws in an attempt to justify an unwarranted and chaotic slew of top-down changes to the way states run elections.“What is going on is the Democrats are trying to convince the Senate that states are involved in trying to prevent people from voting in order to pass a total federal takeover in how we conduct elections,” he told reporters. He said “not a single member” of his party supported the bill.Aware of the daunting path ahead, allies of the White House said that shepherding the bill through Congress was only one piece of the effort. Ms. Harris could be useful in helping ratchet up pressure on private companies, working with civil rights organizations, and engaging local communities over the importance of registering to vote.“She understands the need to engage in what I’d like to call kind of an ‘all of the above approach,’” said Representative Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. “We can’t take anything for granted when we’re talking about having people’s voice heard at the ballot box.” More

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      Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat, Cruises in New Mexico House Race

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      Ms. Stansbury won a landslide victory in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. The result is likely to hearten national Democrats worried about the 2022 midterms.Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat, won a landslide victory in a special House election in New Mexico on Tuesday, claiming the seat previously held by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and easily turning back a Republican effort to make the race a referendum on rising crime in the Albuquerque-based district.Late Tuesday night, Ms. Stansbury, a state representative, had captured 62 percent of the vote, while her Republican rival, Mark Moores, had won 34 percent.Her dominating performance represented an early vote of confidence in the Democratic-controlled White House and Congress in a heavily Hispanic district and could quiet some anxiety in the party about its prospects going into the 2022 midterm elections.An environmental policy expert who has worked as a congressional and White House aide, Ms. Stansbury emphasized economic fairness, the urgency of addressing climate change and the importance of Democrats’ retaining their four-seat House majority.Mr. Moores, a state senator, ran almost entirely on crime and related issues. He assailed Ms. Stansbury for endorsing a bill in Congress that would shift money away from police departments, noting that there have been twice as many murders in Albuquerque this year as there were at this point in 2020.Ms. Stansbury’s victory illustrates that the crime issue alone is insufficient for Republicans to win on in Democratic-leaning districts, at least when their candidates receive little financial help from the national party, as was the case with Mr. Moores.Special elections in the first year after a president is newly elected can often carry grim tidings for the party in control of the White House. And with few such contests this year taking place on even remotely competitive terrain, Democrats moved aggressively to ensure that they were not caught by surprise in New Mexico.Ms. Stansbury enjoyed a commanding financial advantage while benefiting from the Democratic tilt of the district, the First Congressional, which President Biden carried by 23 percentage points last year.She also moved to rebut Mr. Moores’s line of attack, broadcasting a commercial that featured a retired sheriff’s deputy and trumpeted her work in the Legislature bringing state dollars for law enforcement back to Albuquerque.Washington-based Republicans, determining that the heavily urban seat was out of reach, did little to help Mr. Moores. Conversely, national Democrats flooded Ms. Stansbury with assistance.Mark Moores speaking in Albuquerque in May. National Republicans did little to help his campaign financially. Sharon Chischilly for The New York TimesGuarding their thin House majority and fearing the political echo of a loss, or narrow victory, in a race centered on law and order, Washington Democrats dispatched Jill Biden, the first lady, and Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, to appear with Ms. Stansbury in Albuquerque.House Democrats and their allies in the nation’s capital also showered their nominee in New Mexico with an infusion of money in the final weeks of the race, enabling her to overwhelm Mr. Moores on the television airwaves.Ms. Stansbury raised nearly $1.2 million in the last reporting period, from April 1 to May 12, while Mr. Moores brought in just $344,000 in the same period.Mr. Moores made little attempt to hide his frustration at the lack of national assistance, but congressional Republicans said it would have been a waste of resources to spend significant money in a district that has been held by a Democrat since 2009.In dismissing the race, though, Republicans ceded an opportunity to test just how politically potent the crime issue may prove in the midterm elections next year. With violence dominating the daily headlines in the district, Mr. Moores sought to capitalize on Ms. Stansbury’s support for a little-known bill that would, among other provisions, cut funding to local police departments.She declined to say she regretted supporting the bill, but she largely avoided discussing the subject on the stump, even as she aired the ad emphasizing her efforts to secure funding for law enforcement.After House Democrats were shut out entirely from the runoff in a Republican-tilting special House election in Texas, the New Mexico results were welcome for the party.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the caucus’s campaign arm, traveled to Albuquerque on Tuesday to join the celebration and to claim a share of credit for retaining Ms. Haaland’s seat.“New Mexico voters chose a leader with the grit and determination to deliver results and rejected the tired Republican tactics of lies and fear-mongering,” Mr. Maloney said after Ms. Stansbury’s victory. More

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      Why a New Mexico House Race Is a Crucial Test of the G.O.P. Focus on Crime

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      In a special election to replace Deb Haaland, Democrats are bolstering their nominee, taking no chances that a law-and-order argument against her will cost them what should be a safe House seat.ALBUQUERQUE — In theory, the special election to fill Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s seat in the House should not be competitive. President Biden carried the Albuquerque-based district by 23 points last year, and there has not been a close race for Congress here since George W. Bush was president.Democrats in Washington and New Mexico, however, are not taking any chances ahead of the election Tuesday. They have flooded Melanie Stansbury, their nominee, with an infusion of late money, dispatched Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff to appear with her in the state, and sought to energize volunteers on her behalf.“This race is the highest priority for us,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told nearly a thousand national progressive activists on a conference call Thursday night, adding: “Any victory is good, but we want a nice, decisive victory.”Ms. Pelosi’s eagerness to notch a resounding win reflects the party’s anxiety over one of the most pressing challenges it faces: defusing Republican attacks over law and order.More immediately, it signals the urgency House Democrats feel to maintain their tissue-thin majority in the House. With only a four-seat advantage and a largely unified Republican opposition, Ms. Pelosi needs every vote.The contest between Ms. Stansbury and her opponent Mark Moores, both state legislators, carries symbolic as well as practical implications. Special congressional elections in the first year of a new administration have historically offered insight on the strength of the party in power. And this race may prove to be one of the few competitive elections to fill a vacancy ahead of next year’s midterms.Further, with a number of House Democrats already retiring or running for another office, a surprise loss or even a close victory in New Mexico could accelerate the race to the exits among lawmakers who have little appetite to face a difficult re-election only to serve in the minority.Most of the attention on Ms. Haaland’s seat, however, has focused on a central issue in the race: crime. Mr. Moores, a former University of New Mexico football player who now runs a medical diagnostic testing business, has effectively run a one-note campaign against Ms. Stansbury, an environmental consultant who did stints on Capitol Hill and in former President Barack Obama’s Office of Management and Budget.Mr. Moores has spotlighted the rising murder rate in Albuquerque and assailed Ms. Stansbury as soft on crime for supporting a little-known proposal in Congress that would cut funding for local police departments.“We’ve been talking about that a lot because there’s a lot of bad things in that bill that will make New Mexico more dangerous,” he said in an interview, noting there were already nearly 50 murders in Albuquerque so far this year, double the number in the same time frame last year.At a moment when crime is soaring nationally, any success Republicans have with a law-and-order argument here will embolden them to lash Democrats next year with the “defund the police” calls from some on the party’s left.Senior party officials acknowledge that Ms. Stansbury has handed Mr. Moores a political weapon, and complicated an otherwise sleepy race, by coming out for a measure that has little support in Congress and would almost certainly never come to a vote.In an interview, Ms. Stansbury offered no regrets for her support of the measure, the so-called BREATHE Act, an expansive criminal justice proposal pushed by racial justice activists.“Our country is facing a major reckoning and having a major conversation about racial and social injustice, and I think it’s really critical that we address these issues and we have the conversation,” she said.Ms. Stansbury said she had “helped to bring home tens of millions of dollars of public safety funding back to Albuquerque” through her work in the statehouse.She is trumpeting that achievement in a well-aired advertisement aimed at rebutting Mr. Moores’s charges.Mark Moores, the Republican nominee, has focused almost solely on the issue of crime in his campaign.Sharon Chischilly for The New York TimesYet in a series of speeches to supporters two Saturdays ago, Ms. Stansbury avoided mentioning crime or her work to deliver state dollars to local police. She mostly stuck to platitudes about the community, leaning heavily on the jargon of upscale progressives.The election is about “making sure that New Mexico voices are heard in Congress, that everybody has a seat at the table, that our families are taken care of and that people feel empowered,” Ms. Stansbury told a group of voters before a canvassing drive.Some of her supporters, however, were less reluctant to discuss the violence dominating headlines in this city.“That’s what people care about,” said Vera Watson, a Democratic activist who has been canvassing for Ms. Stansbury, noting that almost everybody on her block has had their house burglarized.Scott Carreathers, the city of Albuquerque’s African-American liaison, said “crime is huge, obviously,” but did not know whether that was part of Ms. Stansbury’s platform.Mr. Carreathers called Mr. Moores an “attractive candidate” and, alluding to the traditionally liberal nature of the district, added: “I just don’t want Democrats to take that for granted.”Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who runs the House Democratic campaign arm, said suggesting his party is seeking to defund the police is “a pernicious lie.” But Mr. Maloney also authored a review of last year’s elections that highlighted that line of attack as one of the main reasons Democrats nearly lost the House, so he knows well the potency of the charge.What’s working in the Democrats’ favor is that while they have raced to prop up Ms. Stansbury’s campaign with money and reinforcements, out-of-state Republicans have all but abandoned Mr. Moores. Concluding that the heavily urban seat is unwinnable, House Republicans have sent him just $7,000. Ms. Stansbury has been showered with more than $100,000 just from congressional Democrats, enabling her to dramatically outspend Mr. Moores in the final weeks of the race.And with no outside Republican groups broadcasting commercials in the district, Ms. Stansbury has dominated the Albuquerque airwaves.“Yeah the money hasn’t come in like I would’ve liked,” said Mr. Moores. He said Washington Republicans had told him he “had to make this a race” to receive their help.Like other Republicans running in liberal-leaning areas, he has also had to tread gingerly around former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that last year’s presidential election was stolen.Asked if Mr. Trump was still the leader of the G.O.P., Mr. Moores sighed, paused for a few seconds and said: “I think there’s a lot of leaders of the party.” He acknowledged Mr. Biden had won the election fairly. “We as a nation have to move on,” he said.The partisan composition of early voting returns suggests Ms. Stansbury is well-positioned going into the election on Tuesday: As of May 27, more than twice as many registered Democrats had cast ballots as registered Republicans, according to The Albuquerque Journal.The ballots cast only represent 15 percent of registered voters, though, and it’s unclear if Republicans will show up in larger numbers on the day of the vote, immediately after a holiday weekend.State and national Democrats are confident Ms. Stansbury will prevail, and say her lack of name recognition — she was only elected to the state legislature in 2018 — and a somewhat apathetic electorate are the only things injecting a measure of uncertainty into the race.“People are just exhausted from the election in November,” said State Representative Antonio Maestas, an Albuquerque Democrat. “Political junkies don’t understand that not everybody is a political junkie, so we have to remind our friends and family there’s an election.”After the party’s challenges with some Hispanic voters last year, Democrats have been pleasantly surprised that Mr. Moores, whose mother is a Latina, has not emphasized his ethnicity to contrast himself with Ms. Stansbury, who is white, in a district that’s 43 percent Hispanic.Still, they are working assiduously to avoid an unpleasant surprise on Tuesday. A number of New Mexico-based Democratic operatives with ties to the national party reached out to their contacts in Washington to ensure them that they took the race seriously.And Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who represented the district before becoming governor, has spoken to her former colleagues in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus about the contest, according to people familiar with the conversations. On Saturday, Ms. Lujan Grisham and Ms. Stansbury were joined in Albuquerque by Representative Pete Aguilar of California, a member of the Democratic leadership.Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, who ran the House Democratic campaign arm in 2020, said there was an aggressive push in the caucus to help Ms. Stansbury.“The initial reaction is, ‘That’s a safe Democratic seat, right, why is everybody asking for money?’” Ms. Bustos said. “But I think everybody wants to be sure.”Ms. Stansbury said she had spoken to Ms. Pelosi about the stakes.“Everyone in Democratic leadership, from the House to the White House to our own Democratic leadership, know how important this race is — everything is on the line in terms of the House majority,” she said. More

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      Elise Stefanik and the Young Republicans Who Sold Out Their Generation

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      Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More